Optimizing Content (State Farm Agents)

Transcript

Hi there! I’m Jason Crabtree, Director of Search Engine Optimization for Agent Branding System. In this video, we are going to talk about how State Farm agents can use optimized content to promote their presence and traffic online. After watching this video, you’ll have a better understanding of methods and resources that you can use to optimize content, and why this is so important. So I guess the big question is, “do I really need to use optimized content to promote my State Farm Agency?” The short answer is yes. This practice aligns your insurance offerings with consumer needs and shopping patterns. You’ll do market research, market analysis, and client analysis to find the best way to use your resources, time spent, and how to best direct your efforts to promote your business online. This market research will help you to find out how your ideal client is searching and what they’re searching for. It’ll give you ideas of missing opportunities, and it’ll allow you to align your efforts with where the searches are taking place. So what is this optimized content that I’m talking about? Well, it refers to the materials that are on your website, or outside of your website on a blog or social media post, using keywords and links to drive traffic. Let’s talk about these three areas of focus for maximizing optimized content to promote your State Farm Agency. 1. Using keywords on your website, 2. Using keywords and links in social media posts, and; 3. Avoiding pitfalls of character limits. Your optimized content will provide validity and prove trustworthiness to the online community. Creating content and publishing it regularly not only proves to the search engines that your office has a vast knowledge of the insurance topics, it also expands your visibility and presence on the web. When content on a blog or a social media post has a link that goes back to your website, this pushes trust and authority back to your website. When they’re referring to you as a resource or a reference on those other sites, search engines want to rank authority sites. When it comes to keywords, let’s discuss a few areas where you can optimize the content on your State Farm microsite or your agent site. There are a few places on your State Farm agent website or microsite that we can optimize the content. There’s a list of keywords that goes down the right side of your agent website. Typically, I see things like home insurance, life insurance, banking services, etc., but I don’t always see all of the other keywords. Sometimes I see banking services, for example, but I don’t see mutual funds or annuities. Another keyword that a lot of agents would like to rank for is financial services. Remember, if it’s not written on the website somewhere the search engines aren’t going to think that you’re relevant for that phrase. Make sure that you have an all-inclusive list of all of the services that you want to rank for listed on that one section of your website. The “about me” and the “our mission” tabs on the website, or another place to customize your content this gives you an opportunity to place more keywords into the text of your website. This is overlooked far too often and a lot of agents don’t understand why they’re not ranking for keywords. So, the “about me” typically is a bulleted list where you are listing your education, former organizations, and different types of leagues, clubs, and certifications that you’ve earned. That’s what I usually see in the “about me” section. Why don’t you include some city names and some keywords in that section as well? Then, in the “our mission” section, although there are character limits, that is a spot where you can write optimized content in paragraph form listing keywords and cities that you would like your site to rank for. So those are on page areas of your State Farm website that you can optimize to rank for keywords. Keep in mind that off page, we’re going to be sending links into that website. If you haven’t mentioned those words on your website, however, all the off page content on the planet isn’t going to help you rank. While there are character limits to the areas that you can optimize on your State Farm website, most of your social media platforms don’t have these types of restrictions. In fact, Twitter is the only one that limits the number of characters. With Twitter, you’re limited to 140 characters per tweet. The way to avoid the pitfall of the Twitter character limits is to simply post your content on another platform such as Facebook, Google+, or a blog, then use Twitter to promote that post. That post then links back to your website. So use your 140 characters on Twitter to announce that there’s valuable content if you follow this link over to my Facebook post. The formula looks like this: Create content on Facebook – this content can be something along the lines of “amazing ways to save money on auto insurance in San Diego.” Notice that I use the words “auto insurance” and “San Diego” as keywords in my title. Then, you can promote that Facebook article with tweets. If you follow this simple formula, you will avoid the pitfalls of character limits not only on your State Farm website but on Twitter, too. And there you have it! Three effective ways to maximize your optimized content as a State Farm agent. If you found this information useful and informative please follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn, and share this video with your friends. I’m Jason Crabtree, Thank you for your time.